Wavefront Sensing for Tactical Systems

The Navy is responsible for providing maritime security from terrorist and rogue state actors. As technology progresses, these threats obtain increasingly powerful weapons that may be concealed in smaller packages. The Navy relies heavily on EOIR sensors mounted on airborne tactical platforms to detect, identify, and classify these threats. The challenging tactical environment faced by these sensors includes platform vibration and altitude and airflow-induced temperature gradients which produces large time-varying optical alignment errors. Furthermore, tactical system manufacturing is subject to high-tempo production schedules and cost constraints which do not allow the use of exotic materials or lengthy alignment procedures. For these reasons, current airborne tactical systems have significantly reduced information content. A cost effective solution is to monitor these wavefront errors for feedback and compensation in order to improve information content. This requires a large-amplitude extended-scene wavefront sensor (WFS) with no active beacon to maintain covert capability. Integrity Applications Incorporated proposes to investigate and demonstrate an extended-scene large amplitude, variable strength, EOIR WFS capable of tactical operation. This sensor will be a key component in the solution that restores the degraded resolution of EOIR tactical systems. This will enable identification, detection and classification of smaller objects from larger standoff distances.